Like father, like son

Roger Kornberg's research is about how genetic information bound inside a cell nucleus as DNA, in organisms as diverse as the yeast, dogs, and frogs, fish and fowl and humans, is used to make the very stuff of life, proteins. The key to this process involves 'unzipping' the DNA to make the messenger molecule, mRNA, in a process called transcription. The resulting mRNA carries with it the template for making all the proteins an organism needs to live, breathe, feed and reproduce.